Chapter 351 - 171: Sand

Chapter 351: Chapter 171: Sand

The sun was setting, painting the horizon with a dark red afterglow. In the distance, the wind still howled, kicking up sand from the ground and forming a thin layer of dust in the low-lying air. Under the setting sun, this mist of sand cast an eerie, crimson glow.

Xu Mo’s gaze swept past the small town toward the distance, and as he looked, his brow furrowed.

Beyond the town, what should have been wilderness now looked... wrong. The ground was no longer the color of ordinary earth but had taken on a grayish-brown hue. Faint, undulating patterns, like ripples in the sand blown by the wind, were visible on its surface. Further out, at the very edge of his vision, the scenery grew hazy—not from fog, but because of a vast expanse of gold.

If Xu Mo wasn’t mistaken, that area must have turned into a desert. Faced with this reality, Xu Mo was at a loss for words.

He had studied the route when he set out from Jiang City. According to the map, after passing through Jiangzhou City, there should have been a vast plain. It was a typical agricultural region—fertile land with an abundant water supply, a major grain-producing area before the apocalypse.

Even if no one farmed these plains after the apocalypse, it should have become a desolate wasteland, not a desert.

But the sight before him told Xu Mo that it had, indeed, become a desert.

Xu Mo stood at the window, staring silently for a long time at the golden expanse that drew ever closer. He knew it had to be related to the current weather. The prolonged high temperatures, coupled with the extended drought and constant sandstorms, had slowly transformed this once-fertile land into a barren wasteland.

This process likely hadn’t happened overnight. The weather had probably been changing ever since the apocalypse began.

It was just that back in Jiang City, Xu Mo hadn’t been able to feel the changes outside. Later, on his journey, he had spent most of his time traveling through cities and mountains, so he hadn’t had a direct sense of these environmental shifts. Only now, upon truly entering this no-man’s-land, did he witness this astonishing scene.

A thought suddenly surfaced in Xu Mo’s mind:

’If even this plain can turn into a desert, what about other places? The bigger cities, the densely populated areas, the regions that were already arid—what have they become? Is the desert expanding? Will it keep expanding? In the future, will more than half the world become this kind of uninhabitable wasteland?’

But unfortunately, no one could answer these questions for him. After watching for a while longer, Xu Mo withdrew his gaze, closed the window, and lay down to sleep.

’No matter what the outside world becomes, I still have to keep moving tomorrow.’

「The next morning.」

Xu Mo set out from the small town.

Not long after leaving the town, Xu Mo saw the golden expanse from the previous evening. It was closer than he had imagined, and more shocking.

The areas on either side of the highway, which should have been plains, had now turned into a Gobi.

The so-called Gobi is a type of desert terrain covered in gravel and coarse sand. There was almost no vegetation, only grayish-brown gravel and yellow sand mixed together to form a desolate, barren land. Occasionally, a few patches of withered yellow grass could be seen, looking as if they were on the verge of dying completely.

After driving a while longer, even those last vestiges of green vanished, replaced by the same sand and stone as the surroundings.

For Xu Mo, however, this was actually a good thing.

The surroundings were wide open, with nowhere to hide. He could spot any threat at a glance. On this Gobi, the only real threat was probably the environment itself.

As the SUV drove across the Gobi, Xu Mo’s gaze swept over the scenery on both sides. The Gobi’s landscape was constantly changing—some areas had more gravel, others more sand. In some places, he could even see the dried roots of plants, like a final, desperate struggle.

But Xu Mo knew this wasn’t the true desert yet. The real desert still lay ahead.

As the vehicle moved forward, the surrounding landscape began to change. The Gobi gradually took on a new form; it was no longer a mixture of gravel and coarse sand, but rather scattered piles of sand.

These sand piles varied in size and shape. Some looked like small hills, others like crescents. Scattered across the Gobi, they were the scars left by the desert as it slowly encroached upon the land. The wind would cause the piles to shift, blowing sand from one side to the other, slowly altering their overall shape.

The further he drove, the more of these sand piles appeared. The area of the Gobi shrank as the area of the desert grew.

Eventually, the Gobi disappeared completely, replaced by a true desert.

By evening, before the sun had fully set, Xu Mo had driven to the border of what was once a plain but was now a desert.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Xu Mo surveyed his surroundings as he drove.

As far as the eye could see, there were rolling sand dunes. They rose and fell at varying heights—some were only a few meters tall, while others towered over ten meters, like a mountain range of gold.

In the valleys between the dunes were flat stretches of sand, covered in ripples left by the wind. Occasionally, a dried-out plant or two could be seen in the hollows, but they had been dead for a long time, leaving only bare branches trembling in the wind.

The sun was setting, its light dancing across the surface of the sand, dyeing every grain gold. It was as if the entire desert had been turned into a massive treasure vault.

The wind was still blowing, whipping sand from the tops of the dunes into fine wisps of dust. Under the setting sun, these wisps glowed with a faint red light, as if this dead land had a life of its own. This was the desert.

This was the place that should have been a plain, now transformed into a desert.

Xu Mo parked the car on a relatively flat patch of ground and stepped out. The feeling of his feet on the sand was completely different from walking on earth—it was soft, like flour.

Xu Mo scooped up a handful of sand and watched it trickle through his fingers, scattering in the wind. The air was thick with the dry, coarse smell of dust.

Back in the car, Xu Mo took out something he thought he would never need: a compass.

In this post-apocalyptic world, Xu Mo was used to navigating with maps and landmarks. Cities, mountains, rivers, highways—these were all natural navigational aids. As long as you could read a map, you would never get lost.

But here, all of those things were gone.

There were no rivers, no highways. The sand dunes rolled on endlessly, and there was nothing to use as a point of reference. Out here, you couldn’t tell north from south, east from west. You had no idea where you were.

The route on the map was based on highways and landmarks. But now the highways were buried under sand and the landmarks were gone. What good was the map now?

Only a compass was a reliable tool for navigation.

Xu Mo picked up the compass and examined it carefully. It was a military-issue compass from Jiang City, and it was working perfectly.

Xu Mo mounted the compass securely and started the engine again.

The SUV moved slowly forward across the sand, its tires leaving two deep ruts in their wake. The tracks stretched out over the sandy surface like two parallel lines, but they were quickly filled in by the wind-blown sand, vanishing without a trace.

The sun continued to sink, and the dunes before him resembled golden mountains under the evening glow. Light and shadow danced across the sand, constantly shifting with the changing angle of the sun, presenting a new vista every second.

Xu Mo gazed through the windshield at the endless sea of sand before him. In the distance, some dunes were shrouded in a sand-mist kicked up by the wind, their shapes blurry and indistinct, like a mirage.